The Shahnameh in Under 60 Seconds is my first animated project in After Effects. It is the culmination of a semester long motion design course. Much of the knowledge and techniques learnt here continue to inform me today.

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I chose a topic very close to my heart, The Shahnameh, a 10th century Persian epic about the Iranian kings and their champions. My assignment was to create a 1 minute explainer video about the 50,000 line poem. Beyond that, my personal goal was to excite people to read the book for themselves by animating its most famous scenes.

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It was a massive endeavor for an After Effects beginner. I think I spent nearly 12 hours a day in the computer lab for a week working on it. Sometimes it was exhausting, but ultimately very rewarding to watch it back for the first time. For someone with no prior artistic background, I felt very proud.

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For the majority of the project's designs I traced and intepretetd Persian miniature and rock reliefs. This was before I started practicing sketching. Once I had the characters created in Illustrator I animated them in After Effects and added the backgrounds later. Some foreground elements like the wheat seen on the left were added in After Effects as well. I used puppet pins to make them sway in the wind, despite not knowing anything about rigging at the time. It a time of great experimentation.